Sample letters to MPs set up 5th August 2008

Dear Tim Yeo (copy to Environmental Audit Committee)

ROAD TAX

The news today reports that the Environmental Audit Committee is disappointed that the tax on "Gas Guzzlers" is not higher, so as to speed the switch to more economical vehicles. However, taxing vehicles according to fuel consumption is almost certainly misguided.

1. It leads to complexity in the tax system.
2. It unreasonably penalises those who genuinely need large vehicles e.g. because they have large families.
3. It unreasonably penalises those who have large vehicles but seldom use them, such as the car collector or enthusiast.
4. It may encourage those who have paid lots of tax to drive so as to reduce their unit costs.
5. The effect on the nation’s fuel consumption can be, at best, trivial.
6. The action smacks of envy – who do these rich people think they are? – overlooking the fact that, once the bread line has been cleared, the only reason to earn money is to buy better.

The better alternative is to abolish all fixed taxes such as vehicle excise duty, and VAT on new vehicles, and to transfer the same to fuel.  That may raise pump prices by 30-50% so discouraging the use of all vehicles and encouraging the development and purchase of more efficient ones.  Higher fuel prices would also be a somewhat imperfect proxy for congestion charging.
Of course, raising fuel prices would lead to an outcry from the road haulage industry.  However, that could be given a level playing field with lorries from Europe by charging an entry fee according to the fuel carried.
Paul F Withrington

Dear Louis Ellman

BONUS TO RAILTRACK’S MANAGERS

Your Committee finds it “’highly extraordinary’ for Network Rail to reward its senior managers with huge financial bonuses in a year where passengers have been ‘humiliated and inconvenienced’ by the engineering fiascos and where a record fine has been imposed for breach of the Network license”.

However, there is a far greater reason for the Transport Committee to distance itself from those bonuses, namely, the misleading statements made by Network Rail and its associates.

To illustrate, consider the following, which is from report of the Committee’s inquiry into the “The Future of the Railway”.

“The figures comparing road and rail fatalities are telling.  In 2002, 3,431 people were killed on the roads while according to the HSE (Health and Safety Executive) 50 passengers, railway staff and other members of the public were fatally injured and 256 people died as a result of trespass and suicide on the railway”.   The committee went on to write that “The Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) points out that ‘on average more road users die in accidents each day than rail passengers in a year’”

That data is inspired by the railway industry and it is indeed correct.  However, it is also grossly misleading. Firstly, there are currently 17 times more passenger-miles travelled by road than rail. Consequently the numbers quoted exaggerate in favour of rail by a multiplier of 17. Secondly, the statement by the SRA compares passengers killed in so-called train accidents (and if you fall out of a train, that is not a train accident – instead it is your fault) with all those killed on all roads, including pedestrians, cyclists and people on motorbikes.  That introduces a further and similarly large exaggeration in favour of rail.

Similar misrepresentation arises in almost all vectors to do with rail.  The consequence is that the nation is now wasting tens of billions of pounds on a system that is quite incapable of meeting the needs of a modern economy and which is used by the rich far more than by the poor.

Paul Withrington

Copy to:
Treasury, Theresa Villiers (Shadow Transport), Philip Hollobone MP, The Times.

Dear Louis Ellman

FUEL CONSUMPTON OF RAIL SYSTEMS

Thank you for acknowledging our letter of 29th May and for saying that you look forward to working with us.

You will see from our web site that we have a mass of data on transport issues, most of it hostile to accepted dogma, particularly the efficacy of rail.  If Committee members would like to hear the detail, either in the context of a Committee meeting, or otherwise then we would of course be willing to present.

In my previous I said that those responsible for the table 3.2 in Transport Statistics Great Britain were unable to say whether the reported fuel used by rail included or excluded London underground and the nation’s light rail and tram systems. I do them a disservice in that, since then, the staff have written to say that the data is inclusive of all rail and tram systems.  However, they remain unable to subdivide the total between the systems or to net-out freight. 

Hopefully the Committee can use its position to have the rail industry rectify that.  As part of contracts there should be the requirement to make annual return of the electricity and diesel used.  Without that nobody can have any confidence in data purporting to compare the emissions from rail with those from other modes of transport.

Paul Withrington (Director)

Dear Sally Keeble,

I was of course disappointed by your letter of 9th January particularly because I believe you have an interest in the reasons for the failure of the Government’s transport policies.  Those are encapsulated by the diagram below.

Figure 1 Passenger-km % base year

Comparing the middle column with the left hand one illustrates the change over 10 years with no policy. Comparing the middle column with the right had one illustrates the effect of Government policy if the targets of increasing rail use by 50% and bus use by 10% were to be met.  You will see that the effect is so trivial as to be almost imperceptible.

Meanwhile Gwyneth Dunwoody’s Transport Committee and the Government have come to believe the fairy stories told by the railway lobby. That is why, over 20 years, they will have spent circa £85 billion of taxpayers’ money on the railways (£3,400 for every household in the land) at a time when half of us use a train less than once a year, when rail carries only 6% of the nation’s passenger miles and 12% of its freight and when the alternative is four times less costly.

If you want to test any of all that I remain available.

Paul F Withrington